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Cameron was born in Pretoria. His father was imprisoned for car theft and his mother did not have the means to support him. He therefore spent much of his childhood in an orphanage in Queenstown.[3] His elder sister was killed when Cameron was nine.

Cameron's early career combined academia and legal practice.[7] In 1982, while working as a senior lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, he famously wrote a scathing critique of the late Chief JusticeL. C. Steyn, then a darling of the apartheid establishment.[8] And, in 1987, Cameron argued that three senior South African judges, including its former Chief Justice, Pierre Rabie, ought to resign to preserve the legitimacy of the judiciary.[9] Cameron practised at the Johannesburg Bar from 1983 to 1994. From 1986 he was a human rights lawyer at Wits's Centre for Applied Legal Studies, where in 1989 he was awarded a personal professorship in law.[1] Cameron's practice included labour and employment law; defence of African National Congress fighters charged with treason; conscientious and religious objection; land tenure and forced removals; and gay and lesbian equality.[1] In 1992 he became a co-author (with Tony Honoré, one of his mentors at Oxford) of Honoré's South African Law of Trusts.[10] Cameron took silk in 1994.[1]

Cameron was appointed permanently to the Witwatersrand Local Division in 1995. His best-known judgment in this capacity is Holomisa v Argus Newspapers Ltd,[13] where Bantu Holomisa had brought a defamation suit against The Star for alleging that he had been "directly involved" in the infiltration into South Africa of an Azanian People's Liberation Army "hit squad" aimed at "killing whites". Cameron's judgment was described as a "most rigorous exposition" of the Constitution's application to private disputes and a "landmark" defence of free speech.[14] Others, while acknowledging the judgment had departed importantly from apartheid-era law, said it should have gone further in protecting journalists.[15] Cameron's position was substantially confirmed, in subsequent cases, by the Supreme Court of Appeal.[16]

On 31 December 2008 President Kgalema Motlanthe appointed Cameron to the Constitutional Court, taking effect from 1 January 2009. He is considered a crucial member of the Court's progressive wing.[27] He has been described as a "jurist of the highest order",[27] "the greatest legal mind of his generation"[19] and "in a league of his own".[28]

Cameron's judgment in Glenister v President, co-authored with Deputy Chief JusticeDikgang Moseneke, struck down amendments to the National Prosecuting Act and South African Police Service Act on the basis that they failed to create an "adequately independent" anti-corruption unit.[29] This was praised as an "imaginative"[30] and "brilliant"[31] judgment by commentators and means South Africa must have an independent corruption-fighting agency notwithstanding the ruling ANC's controversial disbanding of the Scorpions.

In The Citizen v McBride, Cameron's majority judgment enlarged the scope of the fair comment defence and substantially excused The Citizen from liability to Robert McBride for calling him a "murderer" unsuited for public office.[32]

Le Roux v Dey, handed down in 2012, concerned three schoolboys who had superimposed an image of their deputy principal's face on the naked body of one man masturbating alongside another. The Constitutional Court's majority judgment held the image was defamatory of the deputy principal.[33] Cameron, however, in a judgment co-authored with Justice Froneman, dissented on this point, saying it could not be actionable to imply someone is gay. Leading commentators praised this conclusion.[34] Others, however, criticised Cameron's "schizophrenic" judgment for holding that the picture had nevertheless actionably harmed the plaintiff's dignity by suggesting he engaged in "sexually promiscuous or exhibitionist" conduct.[35]

Cameron has been openly gay since the early 1980s.[21] He addressed the crowd in the first pride parade in South Africa held in Johannesburg on 13 October 1990.[39][40] Thereafter he oversaw the gay and lesbian movement's submissions to the drafters of the South African Constitution and was instrumental in securing the inclusion of an express prohibition on discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.[1] He is one of 29 signatories to the Yogyakarta Principles.[41] He also was a founding member of the Society for Homosexuals on Campus, a student organization at the University of the Witwatersrand, which later became known as Activate Wits.[42]

1995 saw the publication of Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa, "a celebration of the lives of gay men and lesbians in South Africa" which Cameron co-edited with Mark Gevisser.[43]

From 1988 Cameron advised the National Union of Mineworkers on HIV/AIDS, and helped draft and negotiate the industry’s first comprehensive AIDS agreement with the Chamber of Mines. While at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, he drafted the Charter of Rights on AIDS and HIV, co-founded the AIDS Consortium (a national affiliation of non-governmental organizations working in AIDS), which he chaired for its first three years, and founded and was the first director of the AIDS Law Project.[1]

Cameron had himself contracted HIV in the 1980s and became extremely ill with AIDS when working as a High Court judge.[44] His salary allowed him to afford anti-retroviral treatment, which saved his life. Cameron's realisation that he owed his life to his relative wealth caused him to become a prominent HIV/AIDS activist in post-apartheid South Africa, urging its government to provide treatment to all.[21] He has strongly criticised President Thabo Mbeki's AIDS-denialist policies.[45] Cameron was the first, and remains the only, senior South African official to state publicly that he is living with HIV/AIDS.[46][47]

His prize-winning first book, Witness to AIDS, is about his struggle with the illness. It has been published in South Africa, the UK, the US and in translation in Germany and in China.[44]

Cameron's awards include the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights (2000); Stellenbosch University's Alumnus Award; Transnet's HIV/AIDS Champions Award; and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation Excellence in Leadership Award. In 2008 he served as a member of the Jury of the Red Ribbon Award, a partnership of the UNAIDS Family. He is the 2009–2010 winner of the Brudner Prize from Yale University,[1] awarded annually to an accomplished scholar or activist whose work has made significant contributions to the understanding of LGBT issues or furthered the tolerance of LGBT people.